2.2 Billion Dollar Loss May Deem Facebook as Social “Not”working

Last night Shawn and I went to see The Social Network. It was fascinating to see the uprising of facebook and how money disconnected the two friends who invested a lot of time and a little money to launch it. Napster co-founder Sean Parker eventually encouraged genius and master coder Mark Zuckerberg to ditch his best friend as the business grew. It all began as a tool to link college students at Harvard and now even grandparents are posting! It is a phenomenon unlikely to be matched or surpassed. It is also addictive and destructive if you aren’t careful.

Like any good thing, getting consumed with it can be counterproductive and may even cost you your job, at the very least your productivity. I heard on the local radio this past week that surveys show that it is taking 15 hours to complete 8 hours of work due to social networking, texting and instant Messaging at work. I decided to do some research on this and see if it were true. I have a few friends whose companies blocked and/or monitored their internet activity to make sure they were not on facebook or twitter.

In my research I found that International Business Times reported this week: “A 2009 study by Nucleus Research found that Facebook alone costs companies 1.5 percent of total productivity. Some employees in the study used Facebook as much as two hours a day while at work. Of the 237 employees surveyed, 77 percent who had Facebook accounts visited the site during the work day and 87 percent of those did not have a clear business reason for accessing the site. Research released by Morse, an IT services and technology company, has shown that the use of Twitter and other social networks by employees at work costs businesses in the United Kingdom the equivalent of $2.2 billion each year in lost productivity. From the 1,460 office workers surveyed, more than half (57 percent) said that they used social networking sites during the working day for personal reasons. Almost four in ten people use social media networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter while at work and over a quarter of those surveyed admitted that their use of these sites was becoming a bad habit.”

The website Nucleus Research provided me with a pdf of the survey report that was referenced above. I want to add insult to injury for any Christ followers reading and guilty of this “oversight”, you should know better! Our standard is, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord”, and most importantly, “Do Not Steal”. I am anxious to tell you, stealing time for work for personal leisure is still stealing. Let’s not give people grounds for not wanting to be like “us”! Let’s be so honest, hardworking and loyal to whoever we answer to under God (which is ALL bosses-even if you don’t like em) that people admire us and aspire to our ethics rather than giving them a reason to group us into the “bad” bunch.

Let me leave you with something very profound: My daughter came home from school the other day and said “Mommy, my teacher is mean when it is just us kids wif her, she is way nicer when parents are around cuz she doesn’t want to get her job cancelled”. Don’t get your job cancelled over facebook…..that’s just embarrassing!